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Editor's pick

Howdy! Be aware of that from time to time I’ll pick articles, which arouse my interest so much that I’ll highlight them. The next one could be yours! 😉
Have you ever looked at the sky noticing an unusually shaped cloud, resembling a familiar animal or an object? Have you ever wondered, why or how you make this association just by looking at a fluffy, blob of gas? It’s all because of how your brain works! Your brain is always trying to make sense of the world by comparing previous experiences or visual patterns and connecting the dots. It has its own “weird” way of perceiving shape and form, grouping information, fill in the gaps to draw the big picture.

Psychology in UX

The serial position effect, a term coined by Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist and pioneer of memory research, describes how the position of an item in a sequence affects recall accuracy. There are two main concepts involved in the serial position effect:
The Primacy Effect: Items that are presented at the beginning of a list are recalled with greater accuracy than items in the middle of a list.
The Recency Effect: Items that appear at the end of a list are also more likely to elicit better recall than items presented in the middle of a list.

Check the requirements for most user research jobs and you’ll see that they often ask for a background in psychology or behavioural science. People usually assume this is because psychologists know secret mind hacks like reciprocation, social proof and framing that can be used to manipulate people. In truth, there are a small number of fundamental principles that (a) psychologists know, (b) most people don’t and (c) are relevant to user researchers.

Persuasive Design

First, what do we mean when we talk about gamification? Despite how it sounds, gamification isn’t necessarily about turning something into a game. Rather, it’s about using game elements to achieve a particular user behaviour. In his blog post, ‘The Surprising Relationship Between Gamification And Modern Persuasion’, Akar Sumset emphasises that gamification is not about playing games, or about making users have fun: Contrary to popular belief, it does not entail users playing or giving them points. Yes, those are useful components, but not the whole thing. […] The purpose is to use fun to motivate people towards certain behaviors. He then gives a definition of gamification which he believes puts the correct amount of emphasis on motivation and behaviours. Gamification is about using game-like setups to increase user motivation for behaviors that businesses target. Whether or not this constitutes a definitive description of gamification, it hits on one of the most powerful things about gamification: it triggers motivation.

Human Cognition

The Isolation Effect (also known as the Von Restorff Effect) predicts that when multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered!
This refers to the phenomenon whereby people value a thing differently depending on whether it is placed in isolation and whether it is placed next to an alternative.
In particular, a certain choice can be made to look more attractive if it is placed next to an alternative relative to which it is distinctively better in some respect.

Human Memory

With my background in Applied Cognition and Neuroscience, I have always been fascinated with how the human brain works, particularly memory. There are so many facets to the human brain and knowing even a little bit about it can help designers, developers and creators establish well built products. As designers, our job is to have empathy. Understanding the human brain allows another dimension of integrating empathy to designs. During my time in school, there was a particular course called Memory that blew my mind. Although, I learned a great deal about memory in that course, what I learned in particular about working memory gave me another perspective as a designer.

Video

Attention isn't just about what we focus on -- it's also about what our brains filter out. By investigating patterns in the brain as people try to focus, computational neuroscientist Mehdi Ordikhani-Seyedlar hopes to build computer models that can be used to treat ADHD and help those who have lost the ability to communicate. Hear more about this exciting science in this brief, fascinating talk.